Marc's Blog: diving - Getting Certified in Ibiza & PADI is mostly a scam

2004/06/28 Getting Certified in Ibiza & PADI is mostly a scam

π 2004-06-28 00:00 in Diving

Since I had definitely missed out in Australia by not being certified, this time I made sure I would be. In the two weeks I was in Ibiza I got both my open water and advanced open water certs.
Quite frankly, I didn't learn anything additional for my open water cert since I had already done the stuff. I just paid 500 euros for the privilege of getting the said cert (quite a scam considering that the dive shop was already paid for the dives were were doing).
Then, I did a few extra dive specialties (which really weren't specialties outside of the deep dive), picture taking is a joke, peak buoyancy was nothing more than the current buoyancy in open water, and swimming a square with a compass isn't exactly hard. Another 300 euros later, I got my advanced open water cert, of which only the deep dive certification was really useful (It is only later that I did night diving and nitrox).
As you can tell, I'm saying PADI is running a scam where you are technically not allowed to go diving past 18m, even if you get checked out for 30m or deeper, as long as you don't pay for the full advanced class and other specialties that you may not care about.

But eh, while I still hate padi for it, I caved in and paid the 800 euros (almost $1000 at the time) for the privilege of having their certification, even though I had most of the skills already before I started.

As for pictures, this was the last time that I used film for my under water pictures, and had to get them developed, and put on CD ($40+ for 3 rolls and a single CD, what a rip-off).

another octopus attack :)

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